The Private Wound

by Nicholas Blake

  “I said ‘for Ireland,’ not for yourself, Flurry.”

  Flurry banged his fist impatiently on the table. “So you’re set to be another martyr? I don’t believe it. Whatever you’re in, you’re in for what you can get out of it.”

  “That’s a lie! You’ve always tried to keep me down,” said Kevin, flushing. “You’ve always envied me because I’ve made good, while you sit about trading on your reputation as a veteran of the Tan War and borrowing money off me and letting your wife kick up her heels—”

  “That’s enough! Get out! I wash my hands of you.”

  The two brothers glared at each other. Kevin jumped up and strode out of the room.

  Flurry turned back to his casts, forking a fresh one out of a tin box with the three fingers of his maimed hand. “I was too hasty with him, Dominic. That fella riles me, and he always did. I have a firm intention of amendment every time; but then he’s apt to throw something at me next time we meet and I lose my temper with him again!”

  Gazing past his head out of the window, I saw a suddenly-drawn curtain of rain. The clouds had burst, tipping their burden on to the earth—a sheet as solid as a waterfall.

  “That’s great,” said Flurry. “The water’ll be lovely to-morrow.”

  I wandered into the drawing-room, and absently picked up one from the pile of Harriet’s trashy magazines. I reflected once again on Flurry’s changed personality since her death. Perhaps his former facetiousness was neither natural to him nor a mask: perhaps it was the attempt of an older man to keep up with a younger woman—to keep her amused and amenable. Had he in a way lowered himself to her own level? out of love and mental indolence? Her death had certainly shaken him out of the indolence. The new Flurry was formidable, like a huge, sleepy, grey tomcat which has rediscovered the speed of its paw.

  The bow window showed rain dense as a bead-curtain, the Lissawn seething with it, the montbretia and fuchsia wilting under its onslaught. I felt a fantastic impulse to run out naked into the downpour, as if it could purify me. Instead, I went upstairs and made my bed, then took up the MSS. pages I had rescued and began reading despondently through them. No, it wouldn’t do—a wooden, artificial novel. It had been better burnt when the cottage went up—destroyed, like the child Flurry believed to be his, when its mother died.

  Flurry, Seamus and I had a scratch meal together—they both seemed preoccupied—and sharp at two o’clock Concannon arrived. Flurry went to let him in, and helped him out of his mac, which had been soaked just running twenty yards from his car to the front door. They came into the drawing-room.

  “So you lost your nerve, Mr. Eyre,” said Concannon, gazing at me curiously.

  “I wish I knew what you’re talking about.”

  He pulled a sheet of paper from his brief-case, and held it up by two corners before my eyes. “This. No, don’t touch it, just read it.” It was in typescript, with my signature at the bottom.

  Dear Mr. Concannon,

  This is to let you know I cannot face things any longer. I killed Harriet Leeson. She had been my mistress and was going to have a child by me. I feared the disgrace, and I feared Flurry would kill me when he found out. I made an assignation with her that night. I begged her to release me, but she said if I did not run away with her she would tell her husband about the baby. So I had to silence her. I had brought a knife in case I needed it. I threw it into the river after, and washed her blood off me in the river. I am sorry. I do not deserve to live. I shall go to bed to-night and poison myself. I’ll be out of my misery before you get this.

  Yours faithfully

  Dominic Eyre

  “But I never wrote that,” I said at last, utterly bewildered.

  “It was written on your typewriter—I had a specimen from it a few days ago. And it’s your signature, isn’t it?”

  “It does look like it. It’s a forgery, though.”

  “But you can’t forge fingerprints.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “I got the letter by this morning’s post. I had it tested. It bears your fingerprints upon it—and no one else’s.”

  I collapsed into a chair, dumbfounded. I thought I was going to faint. Flurry made a move to look at the letter, but Concannon whipped it back into his brief-case. “This is a letter from Mr. Eyre, confessing to the murder of your wife, and saying he’s going to commit suicide.”

  “I’ll not believe it.”

  “Explain the fingerprints then, Mr. Leeson.” Flurry shook his head sadly. I felt desperate: the trap had closed at last. Concannon seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but my throat was dry. Flurry said, “Look here. If it was all true, and Dominic funked it at the last moment, he’d have made a bolt for it by now, knowing he could not stop the letter.”

  “This sheet of paper, with his signature and prints, out on his own typewriter—”

  I broke in excitedly, remembering something. I told Concannon how I’d put a fresh sheet in the machine a few days ago, but not started writing anything—some interruption. And after his visit to the cottage yesterday, I’d noticed it was gone.

  “You’re not suggesting I stole it, I hope.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “When did you last notice it in the machine?” he said humouringly.

  “That same morning. Before the funeral. Funeral! I was out of the house an hour or more. Somebody could have come in and seen that sheet and known it would have my prints on it and typed that letter.”

  “An interesting story, Mr. Eyre. It’s easy to see you’re an imaginative writer.”

  “It’s a bloody lot more sensible than your notions, Concannon,” rumbled Flurry.

  “Very well, let’s take it as a hypothesis. X types the confession and mails it to me. Now he has to arrange for your suicide the same night. Why and how?”

  “Because X is the murderer, and this ‘confession’ and my suicide would put him in the clear,” I replied quickly.

  “I see. What about the ‘how’?”

  “Ah, that’s an easy one,” said Flurry unexpectedly.

  “Is it now? All right, you tell me.”

  “Don’t you know Joyce’s was fired last night?”

  “I thought the idea was that Mr. Eyre should take poison, not burn himself alive,” remarked the superintendent satirically. “A very uncomfortable death.”

  “Don’t be a bloody fool, man. Will you hold your whisht till I have it worked out in my mind. Did you ask Keefe what he found?”

  “I did.”

  “Was there the remains of an oil lamp in the wreckage?”

  “There was. On the floor. The upper floor had collapsed.”

  “All right then. If I was going to do the job, will I tell you how I’d set about it? Now don’t keep interrupting—it sends my mind astray. I’d be sure Dominic was sound asleep by two o’clock. I’d let myself quietly into the cottage, with a can of petrol maybe. Did you usually bring the lamp up to bed?”

  “No. A candle.”

  Flurry paced up and down the room. “All right. I light the lamp, go carefully up the ladder with it and the can. I overturn the lamp on the floor and throw the petrol over it—maybe a lighted match as well. The whole room goes up. I run down the ladder with the empty can, lock the cottage door so Dominic can’t get out, if he has any life left in him, and bob’s your uncle.”

  “All this, though you could see Mr. Eyre was not in the bed at all?”

  “How would I see that in the dark? I’d not walk in and prod him, to make sure. I’d just do my stuff with the petrol and the lamp, and get away fast.”

  “You’d make a fortune at the Abbey,” said Concannon, but I could see he was beginning to be impressed. “You’ve still not allowed for the poison, though. Is Mr. Eyre supposed to have set fire to himself after drinking it?”

  “He’d have the lamp by his bedside and knock it over in his dying convulsions,” explained Flurry, not without relish, “and set fire to the place accidentally.”

 
“But we’d find no poison in him after,” said Concannon, warming to the game.

  “Poison in a blackened corpse? You’d never trouble yourselves to look for it. You’d have the confession—”

  “Ah, but we would.”

  “Well, maybe the fella that typed the letter tipped some poison into Dominic’s—did you have a glass of water by your bedside?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You took a night-cap regular?”

  “Not regularly. Sometimes.”

  “He could have put some poison in your whiskey and hoped for the best.”

  “All this is just speculation,” said Concannon impatiently. “I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened that way. But who is this X you’re after building up?”

  I was about to speak, but Flurry forestalled me. “Kevin had a key. He was not at the funeral. He believes you suspect him of killing my wife, so he’d have a motive for putting it on Dominic.”

  “And,” I added, “he seems to have typewriters on the brain: he offered just now to replace the one I lost in the fire.”

  “You have it in for him, Flurry,” was the superintendent’s comment “I visited him an hour ago. He declares he was in bed at home all last night, and Mrs. Leeson confirms it.”

  “She’d be apt to. But Kevin has ones will do his bidding, and well you know it. Did ye ask him where he was at during the funeral?”

  “I did not. It’ll be investigated. I don’t have an army at my disposal.”

  “But you have enough men to keep me under surveillance,” I said, rather bitchily.

  Concannon took the point. “I lifted the guard off you a couple of days ago. That was a mistake, I’ll grant you. They might have prevented what happened at the cottage.”

  “If you ask me, you just withdrew them to a little distance, so I’d be lured into making a bolt for it.”

  Concannon ignored this. He told Flurry he had things to discuss with me in private. Giving me a wink, Flurry withdrew. I felt oddly defenceless without him. The superintendent began to question me at great length about the events of the previous night What time we had gone to bed? How had we been warned of the fire? Had I been asleep when the news came? And so on, and on.

  He elicited from me the information that I’d had no trouble awaking Flurry, and that he’d been fully dressed. “We’d been drinking,” I explained. “No doubt he’d fallen into bed without troubling to undress.”

  “And you say he’d been very pressing for you to spend the night here?”

  “Well, he didn’t have to press very hard.”

  Concannon went on asking questions, whose drift I could not yet determine. I gave him my hazy recollections of the post-burial “wake”—the sentimentality, the singing, the boisterousness.

  “A queer way to carry on, and your wife just laid in the grave,” he said. “Was Seamus not shocked at it all?”

  I found myself on the defensive, but for Flurry’s sake now.

  “Not noticeably,” I replied. “Flurry loved her. There’s no doubt of that. Why be censorious about the way it took him?”

  Concannon was a bit nettled by this. Back we went to the question and answer. Finally, he said,

  “So you couldn’t be sure that Flurry didn’t slip out of the house after you’d gone to bed last night?”

  “Good God, you can’t suppose it was he set fire to the cottage? Why in heaven’s name should he do that?”

  “To incriminate his brother.”

  “You must be out of your mind, Superintendent.”

  “Seamus was not at the funeral. He could have typed your ‘confession,’ and mailed it. He’d do anything for Flurry.”

  “But—”

  “I saw a cartoon once,” he went on easily. “There was one ruffian stalking a fellow with a knife. And unbeknownst to him, he was being stalked with a knife by a second ruffian.”

  “Now isn’t that an exciting story, kiddies!”

  “Flurry was eager for me to think his brother had done the job—done it to prove you were the murderer. What if Flurry was prowling after him, made it look as if it were all Kevin’s doing—the fire and the ‘confession’? So we’re led to believe it was a desperate attempt by Kevin to throw off our suspicion he had killed Mrs. Leeson.”

  “Such a cat’s-cradle of dotty over-subtlety I’ve never—”

  “Flurry was very pat about the way the fire was started, didn’t you notice that?”

  “Flurry did not kill his wife. That I know.”

  “And how do you know it?” Concannon gave me his most disturbing look.

  “I just know it.”

  “He had the biggest motive, and the perfect opportunity.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It’s a queer thing how loyal you two are to each other.”

  “You’ll be saying next we were in a conspiracy to murder Harriet.”

  “And I’m not talking about jealousy alone as a motive for him. She was extravagant with money—”

  “I never noticed it.”

  “—and Flurry was nearly broke. D’you know how much money he owes his brother? If Kevin was hanged for the murder, that’d end Flurry’s financial troubles.”

  “But—”

  “Kevin has left a legacy to Flurry in his will. He’s a rich man. Maire Leeson gets the bulk of the estate.”

  “So of course Maire has a strong motive too,” I said satirically.

  “Where there’s money, there’s always occasion for crime.”

  After which pious statement, Concannon fell silent. Throughout, he seemed to have been listening for something behind my words, but I was beyond keeping up my guard against him. He had that abstracted, listening look still, though. I felt he was waiting for something.

  “You know,” I offered presently, “I believe you’ve been weaving fantasies all this time. Out of the top of your head. Kidding me along, just to pass the time.”

  Concannon, stirring in his chair, gave me a half smile and opened his mouth to speak. At this instant there was a loud double-explosion somewhere outside. The superintendent and I raced through the door. “Oh God,” I thought, “Flurry’s shot himself.”

  When we got to the cobbled yard at the back, Seamus met us, a double-barrelled shotgun in one hand, a large dog fox dangling from the other. The rain had stopped.

  “I have him at last. Been stealing hens. He’s the bold one—I never knew a fox that tried it on be daylight.”

  “Lucky you had your gun,” said Concannon.

  We were hardly in the house again when the telephone rang. I heard Flurry padding out from the fishing room. Then he bawled, “It’s for you, Concannon.”

  I was left alone in the drawing-room. Why it should happen then, I don’t know; but I got a fit of the horrors, imagining myself awoken in that little bedroom, a sheet of flame all round me, the bed burning, the tiny window I could not get through, despair and agony, my body curling up in the blaze like a leaf.

  When Concannon came in, it was almost as if he was rescuing me from the furnace, the trap. He looked, for him, almost complacent. He rubbed his hands. “I have to be off. You know, Mr. Eyre, you’re a terrible stubborn man.”

  “Am I?”

  “Tell me this. What was Harriet Leeson doing, lying in her pelt by the stream if she wasn’t awaiting her lover? Sun-bathing? You still say you didn’t keep an assignation with her that night?”

  I shook my head.

  A strange, hypnotic, almost crooning note came into his voice. “You’ve come clean about everything else. Why are you holding out on me about this? Why are you?”

  I stayed silent.

  “I’ll tell you why, then. You’ve never forgiven yourself for leaving her there to the mercy of— You’ve never forgiven yourself for rejecting her at the last. You never will. You want to make yourself believe it did not happen that way. You never will. You’ll bear the scars of her wounds on your heart all your life. I’m sorry for you.”

  The extraordinary ma
n would have had me broken down in a minute more. But the telephone rang again. “It’s for you, Dominic,” called Flurry. “Maire wants you.”

  I was glad to escape Concannon’s devastating approach. But Maire’s was no less unnerving in its way. She spoke like an automaton. “Dominic, can you come over at once. I’m in great trouble.”

  “Yes, of course. What’s the matter?”

  Her control faltered and broke. “They’ve arrested Kevin.”

  Chapter 13

  Charlottestown had a changed look for me as I drove along the main street and parked my car by Kevin’s house—the look of a disaster area, shuttered, silent, stricken. Apart from two tough characters who scrutinised me keenly as I got out of the car, there seemed to be no one about. Surely they’ve not arrested the whole population? I thought. The atmosphere could not have been more eerie if the plague had descended upon this seedy little township. It was as unnerving in its way as when I had been sent to Coventry at my first school—the sense of total isolation.

  It was a relief when Maire opened the door and hurried me into Kevin’s study. Three small, freckled faces had stared at me uncomprehendingly from the end of the passage. “Don’t hang about, children. For pity’s sake, do something! Run out and play: it’s fine again.”

  This in itself was a sufficient contrast from Maire’s customary equable manner. She seemed to have gone to pieces: her high colouring looked hectic now, her hair was bedraggled, her eyes watered.

  “It’s the disgrace,” she muttered. “How will the children ever live it down?”

  “What’s been happening, Maire? I’m entirely in the dark.”

  “I don’t know where to turn,” she exclaimed. “If only Father Bresnihan was here.”

  “Is there nothing I can do?”

  “Kathleen says he’s expected back this evening. It’s terrible—they whisked him away. They wouldn’t let me even talk to him first.”

  “Kevin?”

  “Yes.” She broke down, sobbing. When she had recovered herself a little, I asked her what Kevin had been charged with.

  “I don’t know,” wailed Maire. “I just daren’t think.”

  “Well now, it’s not a Police State. He can have his lawyer, can’t he? Did you ring the lawyer yet?”